Guild Wars 2

First I would like to clarify that I would be glad to see more challenging pve content added in HOT. However, I think it needs to be done very carefully to make sure that the new content is indeed challenging in terms of player skill. Please let me explain.

In most MMORPGs, a raid wing requires 10+ hours to clear, when it is on farm status. If a raid instance resets on a weekly basis, a typical raid guild would schedule two raid nights every week. For each raid night, their members login at 7pm and play until 1 or 2 am. Many skillful players cannot come up with this amount of play time. Therefore, in these cases, many players cannot participate in raiding because it is challenging to get this amount of free time for game play. It’s not because their skill levels are not sufficient. That’s why raids are often called “time sink”.

I am concerned that if this is the case with raids in HOT, then the challenging part is about getting enough free time to raid for 6+ hours straight, instead of learning the encounters. Will this kind of time sink be good or bad for GW2?

Well, three years ago, Anet said that:
“But if you hate traditional MMORPGs, then you should really check out Guild Wars 2. Because, like Guild Wars before it, GW2 doesn’t fall into the traps of traditional MMORPGs. It doesn’t suck your life away and force you onto a grinding treadmill; it doesn’t make you spend hours preparing to have fun rather than just having fun”

Of course, raids being time sinks would be a typical MMORPG trap, and it wouldn’t be healthy to have it this way in GW2, since many players were attracted to GW2 because they “hate” these typical traps. Therefore, I have the following suggestions:

Divide each raid into much smaller raid wings. Each raid wing can be cleared in about an hour for skillful players who have already learned the counters. Use as many raid wings as needed to include all the raid bosses; there can be 10 or more. Initially, each player has to clear the first raid wing before moving on to the second (since there is a story associated with the raid), but he need not clear both in the same week; he just has to have the achievement of completing the first before attempting the second. After he obtains the achievements of completing all the raid instances, he can do raid wings in an arbitrary order. Each raid wing itself still resets weekly.

This is good because:

1. Raid will not become a time sink, and it will not be challenging to get the amount of free time needed to raid. This is because you just need an hour or two to attempt a raid wing, and you need not finish all the raid wings in one week.

2. Raid will still be challenging in terms of player skill. The above suggestion does not require Anet to nerf any boss or encounter.

If it is too late to do this for raids, it is still something to consider after HOT release. Those who can play 6+ hours straight will finish raids first, and when something like what I suggested is implemented, many more skillful players (without this much free time) can still enjoy the raid encounters later.

Please consider my suggestion. Thanks.

MyriadStars.5679:

First I would like to clarify that I would be glad to see more challenging pve content added in HOT. However, I think it needs to be done very carefully to make sure that the new content is indeed challenging in terms of player skill. Please let me explain.

In most MMORPGs, a raid wing requires 10+ hours to clear, when it is on farm status. If a raid instance resets on a weekly basis, a typical raid guild would schedule two raid nights every week. For each raid night, their members login at 7pm and play until 1 or 2 am. Many skillful players cannot come up with this amount of play time. Therefore, in these cases, many players cannot participate in raiding because it is challenging to get this amount of free time for game play. It’s not because their skill levels are not sufficient. That’s why raids are often called “time sink”.

I am concerned that if this is the case with raids in HOT, then the challenging part is about getting enough free time to raid for 6+ hours straight, instead of learning the encounters. Will this kind of time sink be good or bad for GW2?

Well, three years ago, Anet said that:
“But if you hate traditional MMORPGs, then you should really check out Guild Wars 2. Because, like Guild Wars before it, GW2 doesn’t fall into the traps of traditional MMORPGs. It doesn’t suck your life away and force you onto a grinding treadmill; it doesn’t make you spend hours preparing to have fun rather than just having fun”

Of course, raids being time sinks would be a typical MMORPG trap, and it wouldn’t be healthy to have it this way in GW2, since many players were attracted to GW2 because they “hate” these typical traps. Therefore, I have the following suggestions:

Divide each raid into much smaller raid wings. Each raid wing can be cleared in about an hour for skillful players who have already learned the counters. Use as many raid wings as needed to include all the raid bosses; there can be 10 or more. Initially, each player has to clear the first raid wing before moving on to the second (since there is a story associated with the raid), but he need not clear both in the same week; he just has to have the achievement of completing the first before attempting the second. After he obtains the achievements of completing all the raid instances, he can do raid wings in an arbitrary order. Each raid wing itself still resets weekly.

This is good because:

1. Raid will not become a time sink, and it will not be challenging to get the amount of free time needed to raid. This is because you just need an hour or two to attempt a raid wing, and you need not finish all the raid wings in one week.

2. Raid will still be challenging in terms of player skill. The above suggestion does not require Anet to nerf any boss or encounter.

If it is too late to do this for raids, it is still something to consider after HOT release. Those who can play 6+ hours straight will finish raids first, and when something like what I suggested is implemented, many more skillful players (without this much free time) can still enjoy the raid encounters later.

Please consider my suggestion. Thanks.

oh this can already be done lets say it take 6 hours as you say then these other players only have 2 hours they down first boss on monday second boss wensday and third boss saturady 2 hours each boss and they are on the same playing field as the other raiders.

Linken.6345:

oh this can already be done lets say it take 6 hours as you say then these other players only have 2 hours they down first boss on monday second boss wensday and third boss saturady 2 hours each boss and they are on the same playing field as the other raiders.

With due respect, I think you are too optimistic. In games like WoW, I would say that more than 99.99% players who cleared a raid instance did so with a raid guild for which a raid night = 5-7 hours of game play without any major breaks, and there are several raid nights per week.

It’s difficult to get a fixed group of 10 players to learn raid encounters by playing 1 or 2 hours a time. If you would like to limit your game play time to ideally an hour a day, then most likely it’s because you have a challenging job or other real-life commitments. If this is the case, it is likely that you will play the game when you have the time and need for relaxing, and it won’t be exactly the same time very night. Because of this, you cannot join most of the per-arranged raids with 9 other players.

If you pug, then the weekly reset will get in the way. It should be easy to pug the first couple of bosses, but let’s say that the bosses become very difficult starting from the 3rd boss. Then you will wipe many times before you can kill a boss in a pug. This means that if you want to kill one difficult boss, it will require many tries and thus a few hours at least. This would be a problem if your progress is reset every week but you don’t have several hours’ time every day for gaming. If you choose to pug the entire raid instance by killing one difficult boss per day, you many need to play 4+ hours per day for 7 days in a row. That’s a lot of time and it even requires more time than doing the raid in a raid guild.

Therefore, to prevent raids from becoming time sinks, some in-game mechanisms are needed. Cutting the raid into smaller pieces so that people can attack each piece at their own pace would be a viable solution, and no “nerfing” is needed. I don’t mind wiping many times before everyone in the pug team learns a particular encounter, as long as I can spread the effort over as many months as needed.

One quick action that could be taken is to let players keep their current raid progress indefinitely if they choose to. This is not as good as providing more in-game mechanisms to help players attempt one boss a time, but it will help to some degree.

You can learn the mechanics only playing 1-2 hours at a time. It will just take you and your group longer to do so than a group playing 5-7 hours at a time.

The 1-2 hour max groups may want to wait until guides are posted for the raids or videos to see basic strategies, if they don’t wish to fail multiple days in a row.

The raid is not meant to be PUGed so the fact that the PUG group would struggle at a certain boss is not a problem.

From what I’ve heard there are already raid wings. How long each wing takes is unknown.

People were however getting to the final boss before getting booted in feedback. No one’s posted that they completed that I saw.

BWE3 started around October 2nd at 2:47 pm Eastern based on Gaile’s post. By 4:25 pm that day, they had taken raids down for the first time. So in under 2 hours players were at the final boss. So it might be entirely doable for players with short play time to do a wing a day.

I dont belive there is 3 trash mobs then first boss tho

Right. If each raid wing had just one final boss and three mini bosses, then what I suggested would be exactly what Anet had implemented. But I highly doubt that this is the case, because they said that the first area of a raid wing (not the entire wing) was made available in this beta weekend. Therefore, I made some suggestions to ask Anet to try to do something, so that raids won’t become time sinks as what they are in other games.

The least that Anet could do is to give each player an option to save their progress in a raid instance indefinitely. This is still not ideal, but it will just take a programmer a very small amount of time to implement. Some better mechanism that will facilitate those who would like to attempt one boss or two per week would prevent raids from becoming time sinks.

Indeed, Anet already decided to let players choose to do one particular fractals instance a time in HOT, instead of requiring us to complete 4 random ones in one run. The same idea can be used for raid bosses (not mini bosses). It will make it less challenging to get the amount of time needed for raids, but it will NOT make it less demanding in terms of player skills.